At the heart of the performance lies the solitude of the two characters, which does not allow the audience to decide whether they really coexist in the same vast space, or whether they communicate in another, more mystical way. Solitude, which imposes a second reality between memory and religious vision, leads to the need for redemption, and at the same time, to political aggression.Themelis Glynatsis

Σύνοψη

“We will not remain silent, we are your bad conscience, the White Rose will not leave you in peace…” These are the closing words of the fourth manifesto of the anti-nazi student group named “The White Rose” (Die Weisse Rose), formed at the University of Munich. This particular manifesto was the cause for the arrest of the group’s leaders, Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie. After a long-hour interrogation by Gestapo, the siblings were executed by guillotine on 22 February 1943.

This is the historical framework surrounding Udo Zimmermann’s opera Die Weisse Rose, whose first version was written in 1967. However, the composer reworked his material in 1986. In the new version, titled Weisse Rose, the action is no longer linear, and the characters are limited to the two Scholl siblings. Centered around the wait before their execution, Zimmermann creates a musical theatre work, where historical re-enactment gives its place to a heart-wrenching, deeply personal exploration of morality, death and political responsibility.

The play’s core is an “architectural” dramaturgy, during which, the stage becomes the construction site of a detention cell, and at the same time, the place where the prison is demolished through the near-death, a poetic reverie of the two characters. In the end, a new, hidden landscape of emotion, freedom, and disobedience is revealed.

With the participation of select members of the Athens Youth Symphony Orchestra

FLUTENafsika Tsara

CLARINETTEΖacharias Fotis

SAXOPHONEBabis Vlachos

FAGOTTOΑndreas Anthopoulos

ΤROMPETTESofia Siorra

ΤROMBONIAndreas Kalpondinos

PERCUSSIONSMarinos Tranoudakis

VIOLINThodoris MouzakitisAggeliki Potiri

VIOLAAntilochos Tranos

VIOLONCELLOKiara Konstantinou

DOUBLE BASSNikos Tsoukalas

Ticket prices: 12 €, 15 €Students, children: 8 €

ΤΙμές - Ημε Παράστασης

Starts at

Upcoming artists - Young artists (free admission): 18.00 |

Recital: 20.30 |

A tribute to George Gershwin: 20.30 |

ΙΣΝ LOGO

Είδος Παράστασης (Μόνο για παλαιές παραστάσεις)Φεστιβάλ

Event Type (Only for archive EN)Opera

Σύνοψη

While the triumphant advent of jazz led it to appropriate piano as its main instrument, an opposite influence became manifest on the composers of intellectual music. Impressed by the dynamism of the new folk music idiom, intellectual music composers quickly integrated the harmonic and rhythmic elements of jazz into their compositions, breathing thus new life into classical music.

The 2018 GNO Alternative Stage Piano Festival will center both on the jazz-influenced repertoire of intellectual music composers, and on jazz pianists who will present their own personal approach to the classical piano repertoire. The festival’s two main concerts constitute a tribute to the work for piano and orchestra of one of the greatest 20th-century American composers, George Gershwin. Starting from some of Gershwin’s most popular compositions such as the Rhapsody in Blue and the Concert in F, an osmosis of the classical repertoire with the jazz culture and improvisation will be attempted.

The Festival’s parallel actions include a three-day masterclass with members of the Piandaemonium ensemble, afternoon concerts of up-and-coming soloists, as well as concerts of young artists that will be selected through auditions.

In the first part, the musicologist and cultural studies theoretician Nikos Vourdoulas focuses on Platonos’s electronic song-writing, by probing into the ways in which she expresses and emotionally brings together groups of people from the Greek and the international LGBT communities.In the second part, there will be a variety show with artists from the domestic queer music scene and in particular from the Fytini music label. Andriana Minou, Louiza Doloxa, Alexandros Drosos, Filtig, etc will present covers that reinterpret Platonos’s work at another sound, lyrics and performance level.

Starting from the sui-generis instrumental ensemble of Hadjidakis’ original work, gambist, director and visual artist, Andreas Linos, alongside an exquisite group of musicians, proposes a paradoxical, yet attractive reading of what is perhaps the composer’s most important song cycle, viewed from the most typical English baroque music ensemble, the Broken consort. Translated into the English of the Restoration period, Magnus Eroticus proves its universality.

“Magnus Eroticus is not dressed in local folk costumes. It is dressed in its own clothes which are a composition of difficult combinations of sounds, light colours and poetic dreams. It does not contain messages easily erased by the rain, it doesn’t fight back. The order followed by these poems of Greek poets, forms an unbreakable song cycle, a mass for Magnus Eroticus – something like the vespers for the Saints at some far away deserted chapels with the participation of imaginary angels, lovers, virgins and adolescents. It is a strange litany, yet also so natural, in our inner and secret life. These songs are not sensual. Their effect is beyond action, it lies in the deep feeling which characterizes any relationship, of all kinds, so long as it contains the prerequisites for human communication.”

The leading roles are performed by the charismatic Marina Satti, who has astonished everyone in the role of Aretoussa in Dimitris Maramis’ Erotocritus, and the experienced performer Apostolis Psyhramis. Marina Satti is the new star of our time, with millions of views on Youtube, involved both in large musical productions and improvisation performances with the project Fonέs. What’s interesting about the Once musical is that the actors will also take on the role of the orchestra musicians and will perform live music on stage.The Once musical, written by Enda Walsh, is the theatrical adaptation of the awarded movie that was directed by John Carney in 2007. It tells the love story between an Irish musician and a Czech immigrant woman in the streets of Dublin. The film is a tribute to classical musicals, written in modern language, that has been honored with the Audience Award at the Sundance and Dublin festivals.Like in the movie, the music is by Glen Hansard, singer of the Irish rock band The Frames, and the lyrics by the Czech singer, pianist, and actress Markéta Irglová. Their song, “Falling Slowly”, recorded by The Frames and performed by the two artists as a duet on stage at live shows across Europe, was a huge success and won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Original Song.The musical premiered at the New York Theatre Workshop theatre in 2011 and a year later it was remounted with great success on Broadway. The production received 11 Tony Award nominations in 2012 –an institution that rewards the best Broadway productions since 1949– and won eight awards in total, among others, for Best Musical, Best Actor and Best Book. In 2012, the musical won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical, while in 2013 it was awarded the famous Grammy for Best Musical Theatre Album. At that time, it also became a theatre production for the first time in London, while in October 2013 it went on a grand tour in America that continued in 2016 as well. A busker in Dublin is ready to give up his dreams, when a young Czech musician, an immigrant woman in Dublin, shows a sudden interest in his obsessive love songs. As the attraction between them heats up, the artist’s musical inspiration reaches its apogee… However, their unusual relationship proves to be deeper and more complex than just any simple everyday romance. It is a moving, unique story about the faith that we need to have in our dreams and the power of music that connects us all together!

Hedda Gabler is unprepared to “suffer” the life she herself has imposed upon herself by agreeing to marry the academician Jörgen Tesman. Just a few hours after their return from their honeymoon, Hedda has the chance to dispel her boredom, by playing games with the fate of those close to her. However, walls are closing in on her too, when she is brought face to face with her greatest fears. The tragic ending appears to be the only choice…A figment of imagination, monster, paranoid, individualist, ruthless, jealous, visionary, feminist, idealist, a victim of circumstance, are only a few of the names used by critics to describe Ibsen’s heroine. From its first-ever presentation in 1891 to this day, the work has drawn disapproval and appraisal, as well as repulsion and admiration, without ever leaving room for easy answers.The work aims at making us reflect and awaken us to the standards and the quality of our modern-day social relationships, in the age of globalization and technological evolution. At the same time, it is a topical psychogram of woman’s nature, human relationships, and their problems. The multiple aspects of our social relationships and the imaginative habits of our daily life are put under the microscope in a direct, realistic and humorous way.The music of this opera is marked by the personal musical identity of Giorgos Dousis, with a direct, unadorned and clear melodic writing.

Common lifeA work based on a poetic idea of mine, in which by using poems of Giorgos Chronas, a special ambiance of a different common life is formed, poetically set, with descriptions of a fancy cinema. Four songs have been written, but the whole work remains unfinished. Manos Hadjidakis

Children at ColonusΤhe Children at Colonus are so much less than children, but without ever managing to become men. Children at Colonus compose Greek images of love, wretchedness, and hopelessness. Manos Hadjidakis, 4-5 March 1978

The songs of sin[…] a colorful mural including poems of Dinos Christianopoulos and one of Giorgos Chronas, Byzantine hymns, folk rhythms and a military band that obstinately plays Wagner’s “The Siegfried Idyll”. I dedicate this work to those who can still be eroded by Music and Singing.Manos Hadjidakis, 4 January 1993

Following the great success of Thodoris Ampazis’ opera Prince Ivan and the Firebird, the children’s opera of Lena Platonos, whose songs of Lilipoupoli have raised generations of children, sets the bar of expectations even higher.

Lena Platonos wrote The emperor’s nightingale, a “musical fairy tale with operatic elements”, as she has described it, in 1989, based on Hans Kristian Andersen’s fairy tale of the same name, to respond to the wish of counter-tenor Aris Christofellis. The libretto was written by the poet-biologist Giorgos Voloudakis. The work’s recording featured top performers, such as Aris Christofellis, Savina Yannatou, Spyros Sakkas, Fragiskos Voutsinas etc. Platonos characterized the work’s music as neo-impressionistic.

Andersen’s fairy tale morphs into a parable about the relationship between art and technology, which nowadays is more topical than ever. The work’s modern-day message, the co-existence of analog and electronic music, the irresistible melodic lines of Platonos and the skilled vocal writing make The emperor’s nightingale an ideal opportunity to acquaint children with the magical world of the lyric art.

In Athens, during the Belle Époque, Nikos and Verginia, a newlywed couple, have set up their home at the working-class district of Gargaretta. He works as a carpenter. She, many years older than him, has a failing health, as a result of a miscarriage in her first pregnancy. When at some point she collapses, young Liolia, a lovely, beautiful, sixteen-year-old girl is brought home to help. Under the eye of helpless Virginia, her hale husband and the inexperienced girl are romantically attracted to each other. During the wild festivities of the Athenian Carnival, the two of them come closer. Verginia suffers in silence, but out of love, she makes it easier for them to be together, by sending them to the spring fields to bring flowers. The healthy youths succumb to the irresistible calling of their desire and romantically unite in nature. The malicious neighbors gossip incessantly and the sick woman, sensing what is going on, surrenders to the embrace of death. One evening, as she wakes up, she sees the couple cuddled in the moonlight, becomes upset and passes away. A few months after the funeral, Nikos marries the pregnant Liolia but the past is haunting their relationship. The unfortunate young woman gives birth to a seven-months premature baby girl, pale like a wax doll, who looks like the deceased Verginia. Despite her supplications at the dead woman’s tomb, the newborn dies. While hopes for a new life arise, Nikos is stabbed to death by a friend who had long coveted Liolia.

In the dusty poor districts of a deceptively idyllic Athens, the lyrical and emotionally invasive words of Christomanos unfold in a pessimistic mood the usual love story of some humble people until its tragic ending. Inspired by his writing, the composer remolds the Wax Doll into a music full of symbols, lyricism and a passionate lust for life, while revealing to us the pace at which Nature alternates death with resurrection.

“The moment when a Maestro and an orchestra are preparing for a big concert, restless Viola runs away to the unknown and free world of jazz. She falls in love, revolts and is tested to discover that Music is one and the same and that it is us who build the walls between us. Viola’s strange adventure, sometimes funny sometimes hard, in a libretto by Marivita Grammatikaki and with music by Thodoris Economou, walks the line between different musical genres and styles and takes both children and adults on a trip toward the beauty that is hidden inside us, when we overcome our stereotypes and fears” Io Voulgaraki.

Σύνοψη

In a music city, a maestro and an orchestra are preparing for a big concert. The music city, however, is divided in two parts. One the one hand, there is the classical part, with its rigid rules, and on the other hand, there is the jazz part with its freedom of improvisation. Could these ends ever find common ground and melodies, and be united? What role will the maestro play? The instruments of the orchestra morph into human characters and form a contemporary society.

The plot and the libretto follow as if through a prism, sometimes from a close distance other times from a security distance, the General’s immersion into his inner world, his visions and memories of overwhelming historic events, like the siege of the Acropolis, his stoning by fanatics and his notorious trial.

The opera could be subtitled “What reaches us from General Makriyannis to this day”: What perseveres to the first quarter of the 21st century from this late, “crazy” work of his, as its most passionate scholar (Giannis Vlahogiannis) described it in fear. What stays and what is superfluous from his personality and its refection, from his writings and their secondary elaboration, the extensive studies, and interpretations, from the unlocking, the sanctification and the deconstruction of his myth?